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Originally Posted by Nsd1
...Little off topic but does anyone consider Boston Pizza a part of Canadiana? Although people probably don't go there everyday, their similar to Tim hortons. BPs started a year after Tims did and they are Canada's largest chain dining restaurant and their still canadian owned but nobody really talks about them being a canadian icon...
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There is a good reason for this, and that is quite simply that BP never resorted to wrapping their brand in the Canadian flag the same way that Tim Hortons has. Tim Hortons became a Canadian institution because they started to tell everyone that they were a Canadian institution.
Here's the way I remember this happening:
Before 1990 Tim Horton's was a place to buy donuts and to get a cup of coffee. For Canadians, if you wanted donuts and a cup of coffee, choices were generally limited to Tim's or Robin's Donuts, or a much smaller, more local chain. But back then, there was nothing special about their coffee, and Tim Horton's never really made any claims about the distinctiveness of their coffee—their donuts were special because, well ... they're donuts ... and who doesn't love donuts.
Then, sometime in the '90's I saw this commercial:
(...which is really, REALLY ridiculous, because coffee in virtually every place that I have been in Europe is substantially better than in North America—at least in my experience...)
Suddenly, and somewhat without much crescendo, Tim Hortons coffee became a symbol of "being Canadian", almost entirely as a result of the campaign that produced this ad and dozens more like it over the next several years. I don't necessarily think that people spend their money at Tim Hortons through some misguided form of patriotic or national cultural identification, but it is naive to imagine that their aggressive marketing which targeted national pride did not play a significant role in establishing their enormous market share.
It seems to me that this all happened at a time when we as Canadians were struggling a little bit with our cultural identity, which was likewise also a product of the emerging digital age and the explosion of globalisation. The dollar was weak, the "brain drain" was a real concern, and the job market was pretty soft—especially compared to what was happening in the US. I recall this producing a sort of national angst and inferiority, and it was usually directed in response to American-borne stereotypes (You will remember that it was during the '90's that we also began to see those dreadful Molson "I am Canadian" ads)...
To Tim Hortons's credit, they capitalised on this rather palpable sense of national insecurity, and they ran with it. I think people responded in large part because they wanted to feel great about being Canadian (whatever that meant), and Tim Hortons provided an outlet.
Personally, I can't stand Tim Hortons coffee (I happen to drink my coffee black, and with no sugar), but I do understand that there is a significant element of personal choice in such things. What I really do resent, though, is the implication that Tim Hortons is somehow symbolic of "being Canadian". It was a cheap and very, VERY effective marketing campaign that made the original Tim Hortons owners (one of whom I believe was Murray Edwards) abundantly wealthy, but also one that produced this sense of identity on the backs of Canadians who were willing to latch onto anything to fill an odd sort of patriotic void.
...There is surely a graduate thesis in there somewhere.